Off-Site SEO: A Natural Link Profile is Crucial

Excessive use of keyword-rich Anchor Text in back links can be severely penalised. Especially if it’s not matched with multiple iterations of the Brand / Business Name, and bland occurrences of “website” and sundry innocuous anchor texts. There was a time that in competitive niche markets it was difficult to rank for a keyword search phrase that was NOT included in the link titles (anchor text) in links to your website. I’m a specialist SEO consultant, and all website redesign projects include an SEO assessment of via an audit.

That’s all been changed since 2012, as Google began targeting and destroying the effectiveness of various link-building schemes.

Your link building processes may have included implementation of a blog, publishing authoritative articles and social bookmarking optimisation, social site networking and press release submissions.

There is a great deal of controversy and misinformation over link building, particularly in light of Google’s efforts to stamp out;

Link rings, free-for-all and spam link schemes

Paid text links based on page rank

Anything designed to subvert search engine indexes

Good links come from;

sites in the same genre as yours – i.e. similar or related businesses

web directories such as Yahoo, Open Directory etc

One-Way Backlinks from trusted websites are still good. Links are coming from a broad range of widely distributed geographic locations, never a bad thing. As part of our SEO project work, we offer a range of link audit and remedial works;

All of that will give us a good picture of how Google and Bing are likely to interpret your online reputation, and link building practices. Good links have a predominance of link titles / anchor text to;

The Domain name and Domain URL

Brand name / business name

Words like; click here, website, visit us etc

Very few internal Page URLs

Almost NO exact-match high-volume keywords in Link Titles

The closer your link profile is to the “norm” for your genre of site, the better off you will be. A single good link truly is worth 1,000 mediocre links!